Dutch-Indonesian
The phone rings late–it’s my mother before going to bed;
a bedtime story, perhaps.
She finished yet another book started the next one,
and she talks of her father, mother, uncle.
I speak of grandfather’s suicide.
Silence.
I wonder if I demanded too much tonight.
Can a child insist on a story,
or must I wait knowing it may never come?
He killed himself because there was no future for him,
she says, not because there Was no future for us.
I didn’t say that his act silenced eight children.
An animal dies out not because of selfishness
but selflessness
the inability to pass down strength.
Now in the absence of a grandfather I never knew,
I listen.
No word, no history, no shame.
